Habibie vows to get children off streets, back to school

JAKARTA (JP): President B.J. Habibie vowed to lure children off the streets and back into school, officials said Thursday.

Minister of Research and Technology/chairman of the Agency for Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) Zuhal, accompanied by Minister of Education and Culture Juwono Sudarsono, said Habibie has ordered related ministries to make a list of street children in the country.

"If parents are unable to send their children to school, the state must take care of them," Zuhal quoted Habibie as saying, after a three-hour meeting with some 200 intellectuals from universities and the National Research Council.

The meeting discussed the country's human resources readiness in a bid to create a knowledge-based society.

"The President also asked his subordinates to look for appropriate boardinghouses... and to set up a budget plan," Zuhal said of the idea to draw children off the streets.

In a bid to anticipate the impact of the prolonged economic crisis, related ministries such as the Ministry of Social Services and the Ministry of Education and Culture have implemented a social safety net program to ease the effects on children.

"This effort (to get children off the streets) is being run in accordance to the social safety net program.

"We will subsidize them selectively, because we believe street children play a strategic role and they are part of this nation's future, too. Who knows, one of them could become president," Zuhal added.

According to Juwono, the number of dropouts from elementary to high school level over the past 10 years averages three million per year. He said that with the impact of the economic turmoil, this year an additional 3.5 million students had dropped out of school.

"Therefore we're trying to save the 3.5 million students by putting them in various scholarship programs," Juwono added.

The Jakarta office of the Ministry of Social Services, for instance, has collected data from 25 shelters which shows that the number of street children has increased by 15 percent, from 2,378 last year to 3,963 this year.

It is believed that the real number of children who earn a living on the street is much higher.

The President disclosed last month that the government had allocated Rp 1.5 trillion to help millions of school children and 500,000 university students in the 1998/1999 fiscal year.

Habibie also noted that only 54 percent of the country's 40 million children (aged between seven and 15) were now in the country's nine-year compulsory education system, compared to 72.26 percent two years ago. (edt)